Confirmation or Elaboration: What Do Yes/No Declaratives Want?

Abstract

Recent analyses have argued that when requests for confirmation are implemented with declarative word order, they are closure-implicative due to the relatively knowing stance indexed with the declarative. This article demonstrates, however, that in some cases participants show an orientation to both confirmation and elaboration as a relevant next action. By comparing requests for confirmation that are closure-implicative to those that are expansion-implicative, it is argued that in addition to epistemic stance, participants also orient to the lexical design features and sequential placement of these declarative yes/no-type initiating actions to determine the relevant type of response. Data are in Dutch with English translations. Requests for information and confirmation have for a long time been a major hurdle for research dealing with the action-formation problem (Levinson, 2013; Schegloff, 2007). While a one-to-one relation between the linguistic form of an utterance and the action it implements would be highly preferable, it is clear that for information requests such a relation does not exist (Paardekooper, 1968; Sadock & Zwicky, 1985; Schegloff, 1984). In particular, while some languages like English and Dutch have an interrogative word order that is considered the prototypical format for an information request, the declarative order (or default order) is also frequently used to do inquiries (Labov, 1970; Stivers & Enfield, 2010). The response to these declarative inquiries typically consists of yes/ no-type tokens, (dis)agree tokens, (partial) repetitions, or even a combination of some of these features depending on the grammar of the language (Sadock & Zwicky, 1985). Recent work in conversation analysis has begun to address this issue. Heritage has shown in his seminal paper on the role of knowledge for interaction that when participants distinguish between actions that provide or request information, they orient primarily to their respective rights to know and talk about the information addressed: their epistemic status (Heritage, 2012). An utterance, be it interrogative or declarative, is treated as requesting information when all participants attribute epistemic primacy to the addressee. Declarative word order is used to index the speaker's epistemic stance. That is, with a declarative inquiry a speaker claims to be relatively knowledgeable about the addressed information compared to when s/he would have used an interrogative. That is not to say that the linguistic design of a turn-e.g., morphosyntax or intonation-has no role to play in action formation. It is precisely because declaratives index a certain epistemic stance that they can be used for particular action types (Seuren, Huiskes, & Koole, 2015). In fact, both Lee (2015) for Korean and Park (2012) for English argue that declaratives, or morphosyntactically unmarked questions, have very different sequential implications than interrogatives, and that because of these sequential implications, interrogatives are used to launch a larger sequence, wh...

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